Octavias Brood Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements

This is exactly the kind of fiction I need in this wild time. I recommend this for readers who feel like their imaginations are stagnating, or who want to be reminded that our future is unknown, and thus full of possibility.  Recommended By Junix S., Powells.com

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Building new worlds from the margins of the old.

Whenever we envision a world without war, prisons, or capitalism, we are producing speculative fiction. Organizers and activists envision, and try to create, such worlds all the time. Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Maree Brown have brought 20 of them together in the first anthology of short stories to explore the connections between radical speculative fiction and movements for social change.

These visionary tales span genres—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, magical realism—but all are united by an attempt to inject a healthy dose of imagination and innovation into our political practice and to try on new ways of understanding ourselves, the world around us, and all the selves and worlds that could be. Also features essays by Tananarive Due and Mumia Abu-Jamal, and a preface by Sheree Renée Thomas.

"Those concerned with justice and liberation must always persuade the mass of people that a better world is possible. Our job begins with speculative fictions that fire society's imagination and its desire for change. In adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha's visionary conception, and by its activist-artists' often stunning acts of creative inception, Octavia's Brood makes for great thinking and damn good reading. The rest will be up to us." —Jeff Chang, Who We Be: The Colorization of America

“Conventional exclamatory phrases don’t come close to capturing the essence of what we have here in Octavia’s Brood. One part sacred text, one part social movement manual, one part diary of our future selves telling us, ‘It’s going to be okay, keep working, keep loving.’ Our radical imaginations are under siege and this text is the rescue mission. It is the new cornerstone of every class I teach on inequality, justice, and social change....This is the text we’ve been waiting for.” —Ruha Benjamin, professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier

“Like [Octavia] Butler's fiction, this collection is cartography, a map to freedom.” —Dream Hampton, filmmaker and Visiting Artist at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts

Walidah Imarisha is a writer, organizer, educator and spoken word artist. She is the author of the collection of poetry Scars/Stars. Imarisha has also facilitated writing workshops, for students in grades three through twelve, in community centers, youth detention facilities, and women's prisons.

Adrienne Maree Brown is a 2013 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow writing science fiction in Detroit. She has also received a 2013 Detroit Knight Arts Challenge Award to run a series of Octavia Butler based science fiction writing workshops. Adrienne has helped launch a loose network of Octavia Butler and Emergent Strategy Reading Groups for people interested in reading Octavia's work from a political and strategic framework, and is building with Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network on other ways of extending Butler's work.